No more “pig in a poke” in hospitality: How Eventrend Group reformed workforce management with the help of Giggle

From Városliget Café to Groupama Aréna

The cooperation started in the spring of 2023 with the registration of Városliget Café. In parallel,  Groupama Aréna also started testing Giggle’s platform based on a supplier recommendation. The success of the pilot project quickly became a “best practice” thanks to the management transition within the company group: today, prestigious Eventrend locations such as the Carlton Hotel, the Főörség Restaurant or the Anantara New York Palace actively use the system.

Quality control in the hands of employers

In contrast to traditional labor agencies and student cooperatives, where customers often have little transparent information about the real experience of applicants, the main attraction of Giggle has been complete transparency and freedom of decision for the company group.

“We chose Giggle because here I can personally select applicants based on reviews and biographies. With other service providers, there is often a lottery as to who we get, but here it has been eliminated. this kind of uncertainty” – said Izabella Kósa, one of the managers of the Groupama venue.

The 150,000 registered users available on the platform and the dominance of adult labor provide liquidity that allows Groupama-level partners to fill shifts quickly and with quality in a short time. Giggle is able to respond to unexpected demands within hours in every season of the year.

From flexibility to permanence

Although the system is based on casual employment, an interesting hybrid model has emerged at Eventrend. In the Groupama Arena, the initial seasonal firefighting has been replaced by a stable, returning “Giggle team”. Especially in the dishwasher, server and warehouse positions, a dedicated community of employees has developed, whom the company can count on as almost permanent employees, without the administrative burdens associated with staff.

“I think this says everything about Giggle’s efficiency: the Gigglers really like coming here, they fight for places in our dishwasher team. Sometimes I even create an extra position just so they can come” – added the head of Groupama Aréna Banquet.

Thanks to the cooperation, career paths have also emerged in recent times where casual employees who arrived through Giggle later continued as permanent team members. There has already been an example of this: a Giggle employee at Városliget Café was taken on full-time by the venue in the summer of 2024.

Cost efficiency and simplified administration

In addition to the user experience, the predictability and control of costs have also become a key factor. Traditional service providers often communicate a single super-gross hourly rate – for example, “5,000 HUF / hour” – but neither the partner nor the employee can see exactly how much the received wage is, how much tax is, and how much the service provider’s commission is. Giggle, on the other hand, uses a completely transparent, bottom-up model: the costs are made up of elements that build on each other, so everyone involved can see exactly how much it costs and who gets what share. This not only provides flexibility in wages, but also gives real control to partners.

“Unlike other rental companies, at Giggle we set the hourly wage. While student cooperatives always work with a fixed hourly wage and within a set framework, here we can optimize our costs ourselves depending on supply, demand and urgency.”

– added Izabella Kósa.

Long-term strategy

Eventrend’s experiences show that in the world of catering and high-traffic à la carte restaurants and hotels, it is not worth maintaining a permanent staff that covers peak periods. Giggle’s digital solution is now an integral part of the group’s workforce strategy, providing a stable back-end in the event of sick leave and unexpected traffic spikes.